Jenova similar to the alien in the movie "The Thing"

*Disclaimer: excuse rather poor English. I tried to search for "The Thing" in forums, nothing came up in first pages of search results, but maybe this similarity has been pointed before*

Has anyone seen the film "The Thing" (released 1982)?
Nice short review on Youtube:
part 1
part 2

Basically there is an alien lifeform found by the Norwegian research team frozen/in_hibernated_state in Antarctic for thousands of years. It is capable of imitating (perfect replica on the outside. Don't know what happens to victims memory) other life-forms, can grow to monstrous size by consuming flesh (humans, dogs, etc...), has better memory than humans, is probably on-par with human intelligence (maybe even smarter - just unfamiliar with human race).

There are some notable differences however:
it came to earth with spaceship
it can't control healthy human's mind (can Jenova do that?)
doesn't levitate things

Some good points.

I read about The Thing on Wikipedia. I think that there are several similarities with Jenova, and I wish that we could know exactly what those alien lifeforms intentions are —

There's a good chance the similarities are intentional. It's always nice to be able to look at something and say "Hey, that's copying that thing I like that none of my friends do!" and most writers, game developers, film directors and so forth are aware of this.

There have been scores of times that I have said to myself "Hey! That's just like (that old science fiction film/show)!" during my time with the FF franchise. The cultural awareness of the games' creative minds is very apparent.

I would not at all be suprised if the idea of Jenova was born from the concept of Zemus combined with the infecting nature of the Thing creature.